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| ONGOING AND UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS |
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| www.strozzina.org/open_studios/index_en.php |
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| www.strozzina.org/gerhardrichter/e_index.php |
| Staged in collaboration with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the exhibition presents the work of Gerhard Richter, one of the best-known and most sought-after living painters, in dialogue with works by seven international contemporary artists, who all share Richter’s profound distrust of the image as a guarantee of truth. Following on from Manipulating Reality, which explored the relationship between reality and representation in the medium of photography, this exhibition focus on the disappearance of the image. Gerhard Richter, one of the pioneers in depicting the dissolution of both the motif and the medium, paints over original pictures or uses a blurred painting technique. He deliberately selects trivial or random motifs as the starting point for his paintings. Well aware of the power of images, Richter strives to break or at least question their authority by making his pictures merge or disappear. He plays with reality and appearance and converts figurative images into abstract ones by focusing, for example, on fragmentary details. He pioneered the use of existing images as the basis of his paintings, primarily as a means of transferring the characteristics of one medium to another, and for placing different genres on an equal footing. Through his entire body of work, Richter addresses the difference between subjective perception and the objective experience of reality in which the artist can only offer possible approaches to address the difficult relationship between object and its representation. The CCCS has invited seven contemporary artists who also use the dissolution of the image to engage in a dialogue with Richter’s work. To maintain their own artistic identity the works of each artist will be presented in its own space. Xie Nanxing (China, 1970) uses video and photography as intermediate media for his reflections on painting and the human condition; Lorenzo Banci (IT, 1974) investigates the boundaries between representation and abstraction by painting dissolving shapes in which mere light is the object; while Scott Short’s (USA, 1964) conceptual work is based on photocopying a blank sheet of paper hundreds of times until incidental marks create an accidental image which then becomes a painting. Roger Hiorns (UK, 1975), one of the four artists shortlisted for the 2009 Turner Prize, works with chemical components and choreographs planned incidents to create his sculptural work. Marc Breslin (USA, 1983) uses the pictorial surface like a palimpsest, scratching signs and graffiti into the many layers of paint, thus creating a metaphor for mental processes, memory and oblivion. Wolfgang Tillmans (DE, 1968) treats the photographic paper as canvas. He started by representing everyday subjects and from there he went further into abstraction, following the logic of the medium itself. Antony Gormley (UK, 1950) will produce a site-specific installation for the exhibition, that further develops his research for a new social art where the interplay between abstraction and figuration is the result of a process of dissolution of the human figure. Meanwhile Richter remains true to the medium of painting, yet questions its possibilities, the other seven artists take as their theme the absence (and sometimes impossibility) of making a clear statement by means of a picture today. |
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| The exhibition (14 May – 18 July 2010) will address the theme of time in our “high-speed society” and today's pressured lifestyle with rapid communication and production dictated by new technology, thorugh the works of 10 international artists: Tamy Ben-Tor, Marnix de Nijs, Mark Formanek, Marzia Migliora, Julius Popp, Reynold Reynolds, Jens Risch, Michael Sailstorfer, Arcangelo Sassolino and Fiete Stolte Time is the dominant imperative of contemporary society resulting in expectations of increasing growth in productivity and longer working hours. The ultimate goal to be more efficient and our constant hyperactivity impact on every area of life today, invading our private lives with such things as speed dating (for our love lives), power naps (for our health and exercise), quality time (for being with the family) and fast food (for staving off hunger). This desire to control and optimise every aspect of our lives is matched by a nagging feeling that we never have enough time; thus time has become an essential asset for everyone. The predominant feature of today's world is dictated by technological development, which has massively increased people's potential for worldwide mobility, triggered a constant flow of information, spawned the concept of a globalised and permanently expanding economy, and spread the idea of constantly rising productivity. Yet for some decades now we have been approaching what is virtually the ceiling of this accelerated growth, as evinced by the gradual collapse of nature's ecosystems which no longer have time to regenerate, and by widespread anxiety and depression which are frequent indicators of the malaise of people living on the edge of their own potential in a high-speed world. Today's world is characterised by what philosopher Paul Virilio calls "dromocracy", the dictatorship of speed governed by the principle which states that "if time is money, speed is power", yet revealing the paradoxical effect of real immobility which ends up taking hold of us as we are submerged by new and ever faster technologies that lead to cultural sclerosis and to the paralysis of ideas. In an effort to impart some kind of systematic order to such phenomena, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa idenitifies "social acceleration" as a typically Western phenomenon. The technological acceleration in the Western world has led to increasing rapidity in every aspect of daily life. Private life, work, and even social and romantic relationships are classified on the basis of their time span rather than on the basis of their quality. This results in a constant state of pressure and anxiety. Insecurity and relativism are the dangers perceived by philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, who has coined the term "liquid modernity" to describe how every certainty and truth in the world is fated to fall under the blows of the corrosive speed of a consumer society that seeks only the gratification of the moment. The works of selected artists will endeavour to express this aspect of today's world. They have been chosen on the basis of the various different ways in which they address the themes of time, speed, acceleration and our reaction to those themes. The exhibition can be seen as a journey designed to involve the spectator in experiences in space and time aiming to highlight the inconsistencies of our "high-speed" society. |
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